Chroming My Browser
Posted by Stropp on September 9, 2008I’ve been a Firefox user now for several years. I prefer it far over Internet Explorer which as far as I am concerned doesn’t offer anywhere near the browsing experience that FF does.
The problem with Firefox though, is that it’s really buggy. I haven’t been able to watch any Flash based videos using it for a while now. I have to use IE to do that. It even seems to have problems with forums, not marking threads I’ve visited as read.
And don’t get me started on the memory leak problem which has just got worse in Firefox 3. Once it starts building up, and that happens quickly, the browser starts thrashing the disk. Even closing tabs and windows doesn’t help. What makes this so much more annoying is that the Firefox devs refuse to admit a problem, let alone do anything about it. Sort of like the Age of Conan devs I guess.
Last week, out of the blue it seems, Google released their own browser called Chrome. I decided to try it out over the weekend. Even as a beta, it seems to work perfectly. I can watch video again without using IE. Forum marking is behaving properly. It even seems faster than FF and IE.
So I’ve been slowly migrating the pages I visit over. I reckon I’ll be using Chrome for most of my browsing needs now. It’s not perfect. It’s not even finished. But aside from the lack of plug ins that you get with FF, it’s a superior browser.
You know the crazy thing about all this?
I don’t really trust Google. To me they’re just another big company trying to make a buck (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and they, by law, have to maximize profits for their shareholders. All this ‘Do No Evil’ talk is just that — marketing speak.
I’d much rather give my browser luv to Firefox. They have a great product that has lots of third party support. But their refusal to fix the issues with the browser kills it for me.
Just like the games that I play, I want a solid stable product.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Ah crap. I’ve been doing my best to ignore the memory leak in FF, but if I’m going to have the CoW site running in the background in the first days of WAR to make sure I can match guild invite requests to “real” members… nuff said.
Guess I’d better start getting used to Chrome, though I hope it has skins. The default one is FUUUGLY.
PS – We may not overlap on playtime much, but that won’t stop me commenting on your blog
Yeah, it’s not the most attractive browser, but it is still beta. A lot can change before it’s released — as we well know!
Oh, and keep those comments coming!
I’m sure we’ll cross paths in the game.
The biggest problem with Chrome is that it starts an individual process for each tab. This prevents memory leaks, but at the cost of performance on some machines. For instance, on my Macbook Air, chrome doesn’t run so great.
Dan, I noticed this in task manager, and it could definitely cause performance problems. Especially for me since I tend to have millions of browser tabs and windows open at all times.
But it also allows one of the niftiest features I’ve seen in a browser to date: If I drag a tab off the browser, it opens into it’s own window. I can also drag tabs between windows. I discovered this by accident the other day.
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